- “The ‘Heirloom Tomato Salad’ was made with a mix of Sweet 100 and Sungold tomatoes — both of which are hybrid varieties.”
- FARMER’S NOTEBOOK: The importance of preserving native seed varieties.
- Increasing culinary diversity in the US.
- Eat a kangaroo and save the planet. No? How about moose then? You can have too much culinary diversity, perhaps.
- Climate change: the silver lining.
The heirloom discussion is interesting. Heirlooms are open-pollinated and old (typically >= 50 years). What bugs me about that is that is all so damn conservative. Old is good. Stuffy museum dust. What I like about the heirloom tomato salad is its diversity. Its variety of shapes and tastes (although typically masked by the vinegar). These days I am much less interested in agrobiodiversity conservation and much more interested in agrobiodiversity innovation. Gotto foster the process that generates diversity. So age don’t matter, and if it does the newer the better. I am less certain about hybrids. They are in some sense a dead-end street because they won’t breed true. But a group of hybrids can represent an enormous amount of genetic diversity. You can select from their offspring. How long would it take to get reasonable open pollinated varieties from hybrid offspring? For now, I’ll accept them in my salad. Provided they taste good.
Good comments, all of them, and the article does discuss Tom Wagner’s Green Zebra and others. (I love the fact that Tom is often described as an “heirloom tomato breeder”). I agree that innovation is exciting, which is why conservation varieties make so little sense.
As for hybrids, they are indeed packed with the best the breeders’ arts can offer and with some –tomatoes being a perfect example — it is easy to plunder that diversity by the simple act of saving and selecting seeds. How long? Five generations or thereabouts to fix the phenotype, give or take.
Carol Deppe’s book is the best there is.
Sure, got to foster the process that generates diversity, but that process needs a base to work on. No innovation without conservation.
A heirloom breeder is something to be
Ad RH:
Wow, “age don’t matter”. Now that’s radical language.
Ad Luigi:
What process will generate diversity in the future?
And who knows whether the diversity generated by that future process will be useful (or tasteful)?
Mmm, not very clear perhaps.
Just wanted to say that “the process that generates diversity” should not become the new fetish, because:
– there is no single process that generates diversity;
– innovation may imply the existing process changes;
– diversity should often not be seen as a goal per se, but a means and a by-product.